…next phase of the company’s liquidation is under way. It involves getting rid of all the heavy metals left inside the building that were used to make the panels.

The Fremont Fire Department’s Jay Swardenski oversees the cleanup. He said some materials, such as cadmium, are toxic, and hard to dispose of.

“They don’t degrade at all, so we want to make sure we don’t allow these materials to get into the environment,” he said.

It’s not just the leftover hazardous materials, but also the machinery used to apply them to the glass tubes. “Certainly those tools will need to be decontaminated, cleaned up, handled correctly as they are taken apart,” he said.

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CBS 5 found the building locked up, with no one around. At the back, a hazardous storage area was found. There were discarded buckets half filled with liquids and barrels labeled “hazardous waste.”

Don’t forget, this is one of the many “investments” that President Genius made, bestowing upon the now-failed solar panel company a $500 million loan guarantee from the federal government.

It’s comforting to know that tax check I just wrote to the IRS is being spent so judiciously.

Suggestion: wouldn’t it make a dash more sense to not squander our tax dollars in such unproven ventures as Solyndra, have the government get out-of-the-way and simply let the free market figure out which companies will make it? Especially when those ventures are producing barrels full of toxic waste, while allegedly being a “green” alternative?

I guess when some folks were pointing out that such investments were a waste, they didn’t realize how right they were.

Jack Nicholson didn’t really mean that. What he meant was that the truth would make him look really bad, and probably cost him his job. That’s often the case when obfuscation is claimed to be a concession to the other guy’s weakness.

But what about when a brave truth-teller, like Paul Ryan (see my brother’s recent posts), is lambasted for telling it like it is? Saying that he lacks compassion for the poor, that cutting government-subsidy programs like Food Stamps is condemning a hefty share of our population to starvation, may or may not be true.

I was reading my sister’s piece on the Titanic again, and it got me thinking. Me being me, I started thinking politics, rather than nautical disasters.

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Stick with me for a moment.

Paul Ryan has been warning of our dire financial situation for years now. You can say this about Ryan: he has the courage of his own convictions. He’s one of the few folks in Congress who can articulate the true nature of our financial plight, and he rarely wastes an opportunity to voice that concern. From his now-famous videos on the Path To Prosperity, to various exchanges with his political opponents about the disastrous Obamacare, the man exudes charm, sincerity and raw certitude of his subject matter.

Like the early warning system that the Titanic never had, Ryan continually exhorts us to address-and-avoid the impending financial doom that sits directly in our path. Dismissing his warnings by calling them “mean” is simply to misstate the obvious: we can’tspend money we don’t have. You also can’t do it by printing money (aka: monetizing the debt), and you can’t borrow money indefinitely. These realities are unpleasant to consider, but to avoid considering them BECAUSE they’re unpleasant brings a certain phrase to mind:

His most recent article (discussing Obamacare and its dangers) in The American Spectator is classic Ryan:

The President’s health care overhaul is emblematic of the wrong way to address the problems in health care and Medicare. The law raids Medicare by nearly $700 billion to fund a new, unsustainable, open-ended health care entitlement. It creates a government panel of bureaucrats with the power to impose price controls on providers in ways that would result in rationed care and restricted access to treatments. It vastly expands an already unwieldy administrative state by creating 159 new boards, commissions, and government programs. It is built around the flawed assumption that bureaucrats, if given power over the marketplace, can curb rising health care costs by expertly determining prices and dictating treatment options to doctors and patients.

Ultimately, this approach transforms the relationship between citizen and state, leaving individuals increasingly passive and dependent on their government. Further, it substantially diminishes the quality of and the access to care, as future policymakers cut costs to meet budgetary bottom lines rather than patients’ medical needs. There is no way for “experts” in Washington to know more about the health care needs of individual Americans than those individuals and their doctors know, nor should bureaucrats second-guess how each individual would prioritize services against costs.

Read the whole article. Ryan is worried that Obamacare takes a bad situation and manages to make it even worse. However, he also consistently says that his approach is not the ONLY way out; it’s simply Away out. If we can use it to have an actual discussion about HOW to address our financial ship, perhaps we can avoid ouriceberg better than a certain ship did a hundred years ago.

NO, no, …with all of that and more at my disposal, I chose instead: food. Or, rather, the people who are complete FREAKS about food, and are ruining it for the rest of us.

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When I say FREAKS, I am not talking about your normal, everyday person who likes food. I’m not even talking about the person who enjoys the Food Network, or who has their kitchen looking like it’s ready to handle tonight’s dinner crowd at the Four Seasons.

Nope. I’m talking FREAKS, such as the ones discussed in the following letter/response on the cooking website ruhlman.com:

Dear Michael,

I am the mother of the bride. My daughter is a third culture kid, having grown up outside the US for her teen years. Consequently, she has been exposed to a wide variety of cultures and cuisines.

Her one request for her wedding day was to have a small luncheon for close friends and family to celebrate the occasion.

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Our problem is my husband’s siblings “special diet” issues. They embody the evangelical wacko dietary fads that consume a certain slice of the upper middle class. We have every variation of diet extremism from the paleo-diet to variations of the casein/gluten/lactose/sugar-free philosophies which means they are limited to brown rice, some grilled meats, and some fruits/vegies. Apparently they are worried about leaky guts and fingers swelling from gluten exposure. To compound the problem, there are quite a number of them who follow variations of this extremism—10 to 12 people out of a party of 75 or so.

Since we are hosting our luncheon at an Italian restaurant, we will embrace cheese, pasta, gelato (and wedding cake) etc. with gusto. My husband wants to include his siblings in our celebration. However I have no desire to pay hundreds of dollars for meals that will be picked at, ignored or otherwise snubbed because of their food fascism. I will not have them ruin my daughter’s day by taking up space refusing to eat. If it were a matter of vegetarian vs. meat eating–that’s easy to accommodate. However this dietary demand goes beyond mere plant vs. animal.

The letter-writer goes on to ask if there is a tactful way of getting these folks to self-select out of the meal, without being rude. And, the advice given seems solid.

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But, seriously, was this ever a concern in YOUR family when you were raised? Ever? A conversation along those lines would simply neverhave happened: “Hey, Ma? Rocky, Kell and Zan are all coming over for dinner, but just to remind you, Kell only eats brussels sprouts FROM Brussels, and Rocky is on that 1,452 hour cleanse, so right now he can only consume 3-day-old goat cheese and/or rainwater that was retrieved from a catch basin in the Himalayas. Zan has relaxed his diet, and is completely fine with organic, cage-free, summer raised, white meat/chicken breast, ….grilled only. And well-done, too: not soggy. You remember last time, right? He’ll have his own rub and spices, like normal.”

C’mon…… When we had meals that didn’t require a pair of scissors to access them, we were pretty pumped. And that was that.

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Where did this comefrom? I know it seems to be a metropolitan, elitist, over-educated thing, but even THEN it’s ….a tad overboard.

Author Harry Stein………asks a very fundamental question: “Why, even after the Duke University rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism?“

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Let us talk sense, like adults. Nothing that is done to George Zimmerman — justly or unjustly— will unlynch a single black man who was tortured and killed in the Jim Crow South for a crime he didn’t commit.

There is no question that we are living in a society today that is conflicted on race. On one side, you have the folks that truly are following what they’ve been taught since birth: to judge someone by the “content of their character, not the color of their skin” (sound familiar??). On the other side, there are those who are seemingly consumed with race, and manage to inject it into every topic, every issue, even ones that have nothing to do with race.

These people will insist that the United States is “racist”, even after a horrific Civil War, 50 years of the Civil Rights movement, Affirmative Action, and on and on, …ALL of which ultimately led to the election of Barack Obama. To still portray our nation as inherently racist is ridiculous. In fact, we’re the leastracist country in the world.

And when any of these people come here, they are accepted as Americans the moment they identify as such. If someone — from anywhere, speaking any language, looking like a member of any race — becomes an American, he or she will be regarded as fully American.

This is not true elsewhere.

A third-generation Turkish-German, whose German is indistinguishable from the German spoken by an indigenous German, will still be regarded by most Germans as a Turk. The same holds true elsewhere in Europe.

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Most Americans were hopeful that the election of a black president — thereby making America the first white society in history to choose a black leader — would finally put to rest the myth of a racist America. More than three years later it seems not to have accomplished a thing. I now suspect that if the president, the vice-president, the entire cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and all nine justices on the Supreme Court were black, it would have no impact on blacks who believe America is a racist society — or on the left-wing depiction of America as racist.

Let’s look at some non-news cases. On March 14 in Tulsa, Okla., a white couple suffered a home invasion by Tyrone Woodfork, a 20-year-old black man. Ninety-year-old Bob Strait suffered a broken jaw and broken ribs in the attack. His 85-year-old wife, Nancy, was sexually assaulted and battered to death, ending their 65-year marriage.

On March 4, two black Kansas City, Mo., youths doused a 13-year-old boy in gasoline and set him on fire, telling him, “You get what you deserve, white boy.” Last summer, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an emergency shutdown of the beaches in Chicago because mobs of blacks were terrorizing white families.

Several years ago, in Knoxville, Tenn., a young white couple was kidnapped by four blacks. The girl was forced to witness her boyfriend’s rape, torture and subsequent murder before she was raped, tortured and murdered. Before disposing of her body, the three men and one woman poured bleach or some other cleaning agent down her throat in an effort to destroy DNA evidence. A jury found the four guilty, and they were sentenced, but because of the judge’s drug use, a retrial is being considered.

None of those black-on-white atrocities made anywhere near the news that the Trayvon Martin case made, and it’s deliberate. Editors for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune admitted to deliberately censoring information about black crime for political reasons, in an effort to “guard against subjecting an entire group of people to suspicion.”

Williams’ conclusion? Cases like this will continue to be ignored in the media:

….. because black-on-black crime, like black-on-white crime, does not fit the liberal narrative of the continuing problem of white racism.

And now, on top of all this, anotherrace meme has begun to appear recently: “If we don’t re-elect Obama, it’s only because we’re racist“.

Obviously….

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Let’s show the race-hustlers the door, folks. Don’t give the race-obsessed media so much as the time of day. And maybe, just maybe, someday we’ll be able to have a decent discussion on race that doesn’t include the term “racist”.

As Virginia legislators hotly debated a voter ID bill that narrowly passed the General Assembly, many were unaware of a state police investigation that, so far, has resulted in charges against 38 people statewide for voter fraud. Warrants have been obtained for a 39th person who can’t be located.

…

Many opponents of the voter ID law maintained that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud in Virginia, and the law would suppress the vote of minorities and others who don’t have adequate identification. About 3.7 million Virginians voted in the 2008 election.

…

A total of 194 cases statewide where police determined a violation likely occurred have been closed because the commonwealth’s attorneys in those localities declined to prosecute those individuals, police said.

The results of the state police investigation appears to contradict, to some degree, claims made by some opponents of the voter ID bill that no evidence existed of widespread voterfraud in Virginia.

No brainer, right? Pass a law which would require a voter to show ID, priorto being given a ballot. Valid ID would include a government ID, a passport or a driver’s license. This is NOT hard. Seeing as we need such ID to perform numerous mundane tasks throughout our lives, and voting is one of our most sacred rights, this would appear to make perfect sense. Of course, some folks would disagree. Those people would be Democrats.

“America is about inclusion, not exclusion. And we gotta make sure more people vote and have the opportunity to vote. We don’t need to be erecting barriers to our seniors and in Pennsylvania it would disenfranchise a disproportionate number of seniors”.

Disenfranchisement? Let’s consider just a few of the places I currently need to show ID: whenever I cash a check, buy a gun, purchase groceries (if I use a credit card), pick up mail from FedEx or UPS, apply for a Library card, enter a club or bar, visit a corporate office, apply for most jobs, rent a car or hotelroom, get on a plane, redeem a lottery ticket, or buy alcohol.

And there’s plenty more.

This is how we elect our public officials! Shouldn’t that right be guarded at leastas well as my ability to buy a liter of Jim Beam?